Local company is early to video search technology

TECHNOLOGY

PURVA PATEL, Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Published 6:00 am, Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Photo: Chris Curry :, For The Chronicle

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Rakesh Agrawal, president and CEO of SnapStream Media, shows the DVR servers he and his team developed to help media efficiently pull video clips. Producers for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will use the technology. less

Rakesh Agrawal, president and CEO of SnapStream Media, shows the DVR servers he and his team developed to help media efficiently pull video clips. Producers for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will use ... more

Photo: Chris Curry :, For The Chronicle

Local company is early to video search technology

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If you're a politician who just said something foolish on air, it's now much easier for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to find the clip, thanks to a Houston company.

Instead of spending time sifting through hours of television newscasts to produce their satirical shows, producers for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report plan to automate the process with technology from SnapStream Media.

The sale, announced earlier this week, marks SnapStream's largest to date, said Rakesh Agrawal, chief executive officer.

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The company has a “couple of hundred commercial customers,” including the Houston mayor's office, the Houston Police Department, the U.S. Senate, public relations firms and E! channel's The Soup, which pokes fun at reality television and celebrity culture.

The Daily Showplans to monitor 15 channels from off-air, DirecTV and its local cable provider, said Jill Katz, executive-in-charge of production atThe Daily Show, adding that SnapStream's ability to capture high-definition video was a plus.

SnapStream's server will replace more than a dozen DVRs at the show, she said. The system can record over 30 channels at a time.

SnapStream's technology, described as a “cross between a DVR and a search engine,” lets users record video and then search it for specific content, such as the mention of a name or word.

The searches find hits by scouring the closed captioning and other data embedded in commercial programming.

Google recently introduced a tool to make it easier to add captions to YouTube videos and said its captions can be translated into 51 languages, making it easier to index videos for searches worldwide. Hulu, an online TV and film site, also announced a video search tool this week.

However, their searches are limited to content on their sites, said Doherty, adding that SnapStream's technology lets users create clips that can be downloaded or burned to discs and easily shared, Doherty said.

“SnapStream was the first to reach a critical mass,” he said. “They've been very good at listening to customers, consumers, businesses and broadcasters to make it easier to monitor television.”

Hulu's move into the consumer space doesn't directly impact SnapStream, Agrawal said, because it appears to be consumer-focused.

“But it's very relevant, and I'll be tracking the direction they end up going with it,” he said, adding that his company's initial research has shown consumers aren't terribly interested in searching TV shows.

That research stems from the company's first business model, which targeted the individual consumer market.

SnapStream started out in 2001 selling a consumer product, Beyond TV, which turns a PC into a DVR, similar to the Media Center feature found in some versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

“In the consumer space, our product was strictly an early adopter product,” said Agrawal, a Rice graduate who founded SnapStream with a friend who is no longer with the company. “It was the kind of thing there's a market of 50,000 to 100,000 for. We realized this and said, ‘This is fun but not such an exciting business once we saturated that market.' ”

In 2007, SnapStream started targeting commercial customers as it saw individuals using the system for business purposes, such as monitoring media coverage of their organizations.

Agrawal declined to disclose the company's annual revenue or number of employees.

He wouldn't reveal the size of the sale to the Comedy Central shows but noted that the deal took more than a year to land.

The company had sent a sample server to The Colbert Report more than a year and a half ago, but a writers strike shut the show down for a few months.

The deal finally closed last week, as the shows tied the revamp to their move to broadcast in high definition, Agrawal said.

The systems start at $2,000 for a consumer edition that records two channels to a commercial version that costs up to $60,000 depending on the amount of storage space, number of tuners and other features.